The Car is at the Door

Artist

Title

Date

Dimensions

Medium

Watercolour

Collection

Niland Collection

Provenance

Presented to Sligo County Library and Museum in 1965 by James A. Healy as a memorial to his parents John and Catherine Healy.

Description

This dramatic yet simple image reveals Yeats’s ability to extract the maximum effect from ordinary events. It shows a jaunting car driver standing in an open doorway. He wears a large overcoat and hat to protect himself from the weather. These add to the large scale of his body which almost fills the open space of the door frame. Behind the driver, depicted in warm brown and red is the teaming rain of a dark winter’s evening. The foreboding figure of the man is offset by the door itself. Its glass panels pick up on the red of the exterior while the white panes of clear glass suggest the warmth and light of the interior space out of which the driver is anxious to get going with his passengers.

This work was exhibited in a one-man show of Jack Yeats’s paintings in New York in 1904 and acquired by John Quinn. It was subsequently presented to Sligo by James A. Healy.